“Magnus can’t stand being bored”
Anish Giri is always one of the most interesting chess personalities to talk to. Almost ten years ago, he said something to me about Magnus Carlsen that stuck to my mind:
“The one thing Magnus can’t stand is being bored. He can endure anything, but boredom, he can’t tolerate it at all.”
It initially clicked with me when he said it because that’s something I had witnessed countless times in my media work. At press conferences, opening ceremonies, or interviews, an unprepared, unprofessional journalist would often ask the typical question that had already been asked a zillion times. “How do you feel after the game?” “What are you going to do in the rest day?” “What’s your favourite chess piece?”
These stupid questions visibly annoyed him. He would disconnect right away: you could see very clearly his mind would go far away, right then and there, and not coming back. “Magnus has left the chess chat”
But I think Anish’s insight goes deeper might explain much more than that. I think boredom is an interesting topic because it sits at the base of creativity. The restless mind that cannot sit still will eventually make something just to have something to do.
Scaping boredom is what can lead a 5-year-old to memorize all the world’s flags, capital cities, and population numbers, for instance – as Magnus famously did when he was a kid.
And it might be a key factor behind Carlsen’s mastery. Chess has been to many children (including myself) the best cure for boredom, and this can explain why he spent so much time obsessively exploring the game independently in his childhood, playing alone for hours, and building in the process his legendary pattern recognition and intuition that made him the phenomenal player he became.
“Magnus began to sit by himself and shuffle the pieces. He could sit for hours moving the pieces, in known and unknown patterns, finding combinations and repeating games or positions that his father had shown him. In this way, he developed a good feeling for the patterns of movement of the individual pieces,” wrote Grandmaster Simen Agdestein in the book Wonderboy: How Magnus Carlsen Became the Youngest Chess Grandmaster in the World.
To me, in hindsight, this can also be a factor that weights into Magnus’ dislike for the World Championship cycle as it is. Playing a 12-game match, facing the same opponent day after day, probably fits in what he feels as “boring.” If you add to that the six months preceding the match that a World Champion spends preparing for and thinking about his opponent, that amounts to 25% of his time in a two-year cycle fixated in just one opponent.
This is a lot of hard work with very little estimulus.
His long-term coach Peter Heine Nielsen don’t believe this is an element here, though. “I would rather say he appreciates his time, and do not want to waste it on things he finds lacks meaning. He doesn’t see the Word Championships match as a reasonable way to spend his remaining years in chess on. Interviewers with repetetive questions: also a waste of time. A journalist having access to the worlds best chess player, and then just going the most boring route, is boring, but more a pity,” he said.
Nevertheless, it is often our nature, with its likes and dislikes, that sets our rationale. Not a waste of time, then, but simply a life spent avoiding the things that feel like one.
